Daniel Flinchbaugh has a passion for the unexpected. He's always on the lookout for his next adventure and is excited to try new things in life and his artwork.

That desire to follow what he truly wants is what brought him to PAFA.

During a high school field trip to the academy, Flinchbaugh went on a tour and said to himself, "Only the best of the best from my school would end up here," and never thought he'd become a student.

His road to PAFA included some time at Bucknell University where Flinchbaugh began as a double major in art and mechanical engineering. He wanted to chase his passion for building things, but eventually realized engineering wasn't the right path for him.

"I like to say I got to thermodynamics and thought, ‘Why am I doing this, I want to build stuff but I don't want to do so much math.' I started learning that as an engineer, if you build something and you fail, then people die. If I build something, I just want it to fall over. I don't want people to die from it," Flinchbaugh said over lunch at Tableau, PAFA's on-campus café.

Flinchbaugh is now a third year studying painting. He initially transferred to PAFA as a sculpture major but took to heart the comments of painting professor Al Gury.

"In my first class with him, he looked at me and said I was going to be a painter and somehow it stuck with me," he said. "And as I was going down the road I realized I had a lot more growing to do in painting than in sculpting. I found landscape painting and fell in love with landscape."

His corner of a gang studio on the 9th floor of the Hamilton building has more than a dozen paintings and sketches on the walls, but a sculpture on the table shows he's not done exploring the medium. In 2018, Flinchbaugh won the 2018 Stewardson Figure Modeling Competition.

"This semester I'm doing a sculpture minor," he said. "I'm really excited about this coming semester and seeing how my sculpture has changed and grown as I've focused on painting the past two years."

By focusing on painting Flinchbaugh realized a thread going through most of his work: water. It's woven throughout most of his paintings, whether he's using watercolors or painting scenes with water in an painting.

That love of water led Flinchbaugh to a two-month program in canal-filled Copenhagen to study architecture.

"I worked with student services to figure out what the best abroad program would be. Instead of doing art-related I decided to do something I've always been interested in but don't really have the ability to study at PAFA," he said.

The time in Denmark was exciting for Flinchbaugh. Seeing Copenhagen, and how important the relationship is between people and water, helped him realize what he might like to do after graduation.

"I'm realizing my path might be leading me towards landscape architecture or urban planning, where I'm bringing people close to water," he said. "I think that might be a dream job of mine. I think that through studying the aesthetics and painting of landscape and sculpture and form, it will set me up for however I want to get there, whether it's grad school, internships, or entry level jobs to get into that field."

As for his immediate plans for what's next, those are still up in the air. In between working in the gang studio and taking classes Flinchbaugh is applying for several upcoming residences. He could be spending time this summer in Lancaster, Pennsylvania or on a sailing boat in Greece. Either way, he's excited for what's around the corner.

"A lot of incredible opportunities are becoming available that I never saw myself pursuing four years ago and here I am, I feel like I'm being successful at it."

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—LeAnne Matlach (LMatlach@pafa.org)